The present invention concerns an adaptor for a portable electronic device, of the smart card type, with a format smaller than the current standard format and more particularly smaller than the current standard minicard format.
The invention also relates to the method of manufacturing the adaptor according to the present invention.
There exist principally two standard formats of smart card on the market. Firstly the smart cards complying with the ISO standard, essentially intended for communication, identification or electronic cash operations for example, and on the other hand smart cards complying with the so-called mini SIM card standard, essentially intended to be inserted in a mobile telephone to the GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) standard for example.
The present invention concerns more particularly the field of minicards for a mobile telephony application.
A minicard to the current standard format is illustrated schematically, seen from above, in FIG. 1.
Such a minicard constitutes a smart card with contact having a support 100, produced by plastic moulding or injection, and a microcircuit 10′ attached to the said support 100 with metallisation areas 11′ flush with the surface of the support 100 so as to allow an electrical connection of the chip of the microcircuit 10′ with an operating circuit, for example the electronic circuit of the mobile telephone.
These current minicards comply with an established international standard which fixes their dimensions in order to allow their use with any mobile telephone complying with the same standard. In particular, the minicards have a rectangular-shaped card body 100, 15 mm by 25 mm, with a thickness of 760 μm, and has a locating cut 105, 3 mm by 3 mm, on the bottom right hand corner of the card support 100.
The microcircuit 10′ is situated at a precise location on the support 100 of the minicard to allow standard electrical connection with the connectors of the telephones to the standard.
Preferentially, the microcircuit 10′ has been placed in a cavity previously provided in the minicard support 100. The cavity can be produced by machining or at the time of plastic injection in the card mould, for example, or by any other well-known technique.
Likewise, the insetting, or attaching, of the microcircuit 10′ in this cavity is produced by hot pressing or by gluing for example, or by any other means, according to techniques also well known to experts.
Thus the microcircuit 10′ is situated at a precise location on the support 100 defined by the mini SIM standard, which fixes this location on the corner opposite to the locating cut, that is to say the top left-hand corner, at 1.5 mm from the top edge and 4 mm from the left-hand edge.